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The league tables explained

An alt-3 ranking takes proper account of each team’s schedule strength —
that is, whether they have played (on average, to date) unusually ‘easy’ or
‘hard’ matches.

This includes the strength of the opponents played so far, and also
any imbalance in the numbers of matches played at home and away. (The ‘home
advantage’ effect in many major football leagues can be substantial.)

The alt-3 table displays two new columns, labelled ePld and Rate.
We describe here, just briefly,
what each of those columns refers to.

The two columns are as follows:

ePld, the assessed effective number of matches played by each team.

This
reflects how tough a schedule each team has faced, since the start
of the season. An ‘average’ schedule results in ePld being the same as the
actual number of matches played to date. But if a team has faced a
particularly tough set of matches so far — i.e., matches against a
stronger than
average set of opponents, and/or more matches played away than at home
— then that team has in effect used up fewer of their realistic chances to
accumulate
league points than their actual number of matches played would indicate. The
team’s value of ePld quantifies this: the difference between the
actual and effective matches played

schedule strength = Pld − ePld

tells us how many schedule-strength-related
‘games in hand’ each such team has.

Similarly for teams whose fixtures
to date have been easier than average: those teams’
ePld values will be larger
than the actual number of matches played.

In the alt-3 table, teams that currently have
1.0 or more schedule-strength-related
‘games in hand’ are highlighted in light green: such teams are actually doing
better than their accumulated league points would seem to indicate.
Teams whose ePld number exceeds their actual number of matches played
are highlighted in light red: those are the teams doing appreciably less well than
their accumulated league points would suggest.

Where schedule-strength imbalance is so strong that
ePld and ePld differ by more than 2.0, the
entry in the ePld column is shown in bold type.

Rate, the league points per effective match played, for each team.

This is the column that determines the ordering of teams in the alt-3 table.

The Rate — or league points per effective match played —
is simply the ratio of two other columns in the table:

Rate = Pts ÷ ePld.

Where a team’s fixture schedule to date is unusually tough, or unusually easy,
the alt-3Rate will be substantially more informative than the
simple tally of league points accumulated, as an indicator of current
standing in the league.

It really must be emphasised that an alt-3 table is not a prediction.
The effective matches played, ePLd,
and the consequent points-per-effective-match Rate, are
designed specifically to reflect fairly the relative performance
of teams since the start of the current season — that is, to
represent faithfully what has happened,
rather than to predict
what will happen in the future.

A good predictive model would, instead,
most likely need to take into account much more information than
simply the match results seen already within the current season.

It would be of course be mathematically possible to turn
the computed Rate values into numbers that correspond directly to
end-of-season points totals (for example, in the English Premier League,
we could just multiply each team’s
computed Rate by 38 to do that). But such a ‘prediction’
would almost certainly be inferior to other possible methods —
methods that are not constrained to use all of (and only)
the match-result data from
the current season, for example.